


What If We Had

by Arimanes (Kara_Sevda)



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, F/M, Oral Sex, when you're feeling unfed by netflix and decide to attempt bad smut instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:14:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28408329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kara_Sevda/pseuds/Arimanes
Summary: Every other girl from the Menagerie is dressed like it. Necklines slit to the navel, breasts pushed to half-overflow bodices, skirts revealing stockings and thighs.With her wrist-length white sleeves and high collar, this girl looks more like she’s about to attend church or like one of the figurines of a saint he’d find near an altar.
Relationships: The Darkling | Aleksander Morozova/Alina Starkov
Comments: 7
Kudos: 81





	What If We Had

If he had come here as a Grisha, they would’ve had his throat cut in a backstreet alleyway, his pockets emptied to make it appear a robbery, and his corpse weighted down to the polluted bowels of the Beurskanal. Not even his king, not this current one anyway, knows that he is a Grisha though, and thus, councilmen’s doors in the Geldstraat usher him inside with false cheer as Ravka’s emissary. A guest to honor. A guest to extort.

The Councilman’s servants have only just cleared the table of the last main course when the mercher claps his beringed hands together and announces with relish, “Our friends from the Menagerie have brought dessert.”

Indeed, the house servants have not re-entered. Instead, a much more colourful flock parades into the dining hall, perfume wafting in with laughter. Ah, this is why his mother had given him such a look upon seeing his agenda for Ketterdam.

One woman leans over his seat, her lacquered nails running across her clavicles. When he doesn’t grasp the gently swinging clasp that will undo the furs to reveal more, she reaches for his gloved hand. As firmly as he can without hurting her, he pins her hand back to her side. 

“I prefer to just look,” Aleksander says, his smile not reaching his eyes, but that’s alright because hers doesn’t either. 

So he looks on as his hosts warm their laps and their hands, more and more brazen as if the sight might entice him to so similarly engage.

“More wine!” the Councilman’s son demands, first slapping the table and then the rear on his lap.

Aleksander is pondering the needlessly ornate face of a clock for whether good manners demand any more of his time when another girl slips into the dining hall, carrying a decanter with a scowl and gloved hands. She doesn’t take them off as she pours for the Councilman’s son, or as she refills the glasses of other guests. It’s not exactly unusual. If anything, Aleksander figures he should probably thank his host for employing more hygienic practices in this respect at least. 

As she tops off the glass of the mercher across from him, he realizes that she could rival him as the most covered-up person in the room by now. Apart from her face, no fingerspan of her skin, not even the nape of her neck that would otherwise be exposed by her braided black hair, is bared to the room. 

Every other girl from the Menagerie is dressed like it. Necklines slit to the navel, breasts pushed to half-overflow bodices, skirts revealing stockings and thighs. 

With her wrist-length white sleeves and high collar, this girl looks more like she’s about to attend church or like one of the figurines of a saint he’d find near an altar.

He empties his glass into a picked-clean fruit bowl and waits for her attentive eyes to drift towards his.

Her eyes do lock onto his, her gaze initially direct and inquisitive, before dropping in notice of his gloves. A scrunch appears on her brow, and she lowers her eyes, hastily collecting a stack of plates to cradle under the decanter in her arms before heading clearly for the exit. 

“Girl,” his neighbor at the table calls out with a pounding fist. “Girl! What, is the little Shu serpent deaf as well as dumb?”

Having cleared his arms of his previous quarry, the Councilman’s son abruptly seizes her by the waist.

What everyone else hears is the sound of at least one plate cracking.

For his senses only it feels like, there is a thrum of something else, more akin to vibration than sound.

Pedestrian noise washes over him again. 

The girl has not even looked up, muttering a thousand apologies as she clears the tiles of fragmented crockery and backs out of the room.

He does not get up immediately. 

As soon as the clock’s longer hand skims a new number though, he makes his excuses to head for the door. 

The girl, it turns out, did not go back to the kitchens. He finds her in the hallway leading to the Councilman’s study. From the other end of the corridor, he can see her profile tilted up to inspect a finely detailed map. Her dress, he realizes, is not entirely decent after all. The light from the sconces behind her render her white skirt almost sheer, and he can see the outline of her legs, the curve from upper thigh to lower back. As she turns towards him, he can see the apex of where her legs meet before she clutches the decanter in front of her like a shield.

“I was just looking,” she blurts out, eyes darting from his face to the map. “I wasn’t about to cause any mischief, and I’m no thief.”

“You don’t seem to be a very good kitchen maid either,” he says, his eyes drifting to the decanter before he nods over his shoulder. “The kitchens are back that way.”

Her lashes fan down. “I’m not part of this household. I’m just — helping out for the night.”

“So you are part of the Menagerie?” He keeps his tone neutral. 

She raises her eyes slightly, but she is looking past him, beyond him. “Only temporarily. Only until I — get out, or they throw me out I suppose. I think they’re starting to realize I might not be a very good fit for their business.”

“How so?”

Her mouth purses as if around a sour taste, and her words stream out with an audible exhale. “Last week, there was an incident. I don’t know how, but I — hurt a guest.”

“Really?”

She gives him a look. “Yes, really, but no, we’re not that kind of establishment where that’s expected.”

“So tonight, you’re just —”

“I’m only here to serve wine.” Her eyes are glacial even as the rest of her is ringed in warm light. “So if you’ll excuse me —”

“Do you have something against Ravkans?”

Her eyes flicker to the map again. “No.”

“Hmm. I couldn’t help but notice you were ever so obliging in refilling almost every glass but mine.”

“Perhaps I thought you’d had enough.”

“Or perhaps you’re afraid of me.”

“I’m not,” she says slowly, even though her feet have begun to tread a half-circle around him. “If you give me no reason to be.”

“Could you lend me your hand for a moment?”

Her confusion is apparent. “My hands are full, sir.”

Quick as a thief’s knife, he draws the small gloved hand that is merely cupping the decanter towards him and pulls her glove off — noting the gash of red on the white fabric — with his other hand. Her small fist tries to yank his grip off like an offending bracelet, but he holds firm, threading his fingers with hers until he feels the pulse that is there in everyone and the deeper pulse that is not. The sconces closest to him flicker out. Internally and externally, she rears against him like something feral.

He lets go, more due to frustration that she is managing to reel in whatever had responded to his call than the little stomp she delivers to his shin. 

Rigidly, she takes a step back, then another, one hand still holding the decanter like she might throw it at him. 

Aleksander straightens and makes no other move towards her. Not every Grisha responds to the same stimulus, he remembers his mother once saying over his bandaged hand. The catalyst can range from the more banal to the most intense of sensations. He can recalibrate his approach.

The girl has withdrawn far back enough in the hallway to reach the corner where it connects to another. With one last narrowed-eyed look at him, she flees, leaving him with her glove.

* * *

“You have a booking,” is the first non-insult the Menagerie’s Madam has said to her in a week. “Finally.”

One hand on the gold-painted staircase, Alina pauses only momentarily in her steps. This was always going to happen, she tells herself, her grinding teeth only loud in her own head. No girl in here keeps this roof over her head by just serving wine. 

“You need to be bathed, dressed, and back down here within the hour.”

“The client’s not coming here?”

“No. The request was specific. You’re to go to him. Probably the fastidious sort.”

Hands clenching in the folds of her skirt, Alina dares to ask, “Did you tell him about what happened last time? Did you warn him that I might not be —”

“Yes, yes, he was duly warned. He said it will not be an issue. That he can handle it. Though I’m sure if your cunt proves as dangerous to a man as your hands, you’ll be giving the little death a new meaning.”

Cheeks ruddier by the second, Alina ascends the stairs without another word. Last time, the client had come here for his business, and though the walls muffled many sounds, they had not muted his cries of panic and then terror. 

She has not decided whether she wants the next one to fare any better.

* * *

The stone in her stomach feels like it has started to puncture her organs as soon as she sees where the client’s instructions lead. 

Outside the obsidian-and-gold doors of the Ravkan embassy, she whispers urgently to the lackey escorting her, “I think we have the wrong address. I saw the Ravkan emissary at a gathering a few nights ago, and he was _disgusted_ by the sight of us. He most certainly would feel offended —”

The embassy guard however clears his throat, looks her up and down, and curtly directs her escort to leave her in the foyer. Like a package.

Alina does not know how the light flashed from her hands last week, but her arms feel static with perplexing energy as another member of the embassy personnel leads her upstairs, in a direction to which she can only presume most visitors are not escorted.

When the door clicks shut behind her, it is inevitably the bed to which her eyes are first drawn. Movement registers in her periphery though, and Alina flattens her back against the door as the man at the desk against the wood-paneled walls pushes his chair back to stand. 

He tosses something small and white at her, and to her own surprise, she catches it through startled blinking. 

“I thought I’d return your glove.”

She balls the fabric in her knotted hands. “No need. As you can see, I have new ones.”

A small smile plays along his lips. “Are you going to keep those on the whole time?”

Alina’s mouth parts as she tries to somewhat coherently explain what happened last time. “Probably. It’s for your own safety really. I don’t know if Madam told you the full story. I mean, I don’t even understand it truly, but the man last week, he ended up blind —”

The smile doesn’t leave his mouth. “Yes. I kept wondering if that was a euphemism for something else, or a Kerch way of expressing that you are truly...divine.”

Nervous laughter escapes her. “Sir, it isn’t at all a jest. He’s still under hospice care. I’d visit him, but he was quite adamant that he never wanted to see me again.”

His eyes glint at her. “I wouldn’t have asked for you if I thought it was a jest.”

His words from the night of their first meeting resurface. “Are you — do you like pain in these encounters? Because I think you may be mistaken —”

“I’m not mistaken,” he says, sounding more sure than she’s ever been of anything in her life. “And I’m not afraid.”

Fingers playing with the tips of her hair, Alina surveys the room and manages to force out, “Where do you want me then?”

He nods at the bed, striding back towards the desk and the room’s one window. “I think you’ll find you fit on that bed. Unless you’d prefer the floor? The desk?”

“No,” she mouths at a pitch likely softer than he can hear. There is no grace in her movements as her leaden hands pull off her cloak, or as her dress pools at her feet and she kicks it to the side. With something vicious, she wrenches off her gloves. If he’d wanted lithe seduction, she decides as she climbs onto the bed and curls onto her side, he should’ve asked for someone else. 

“Do you have a name?” she asks over her shoulder. 

“Do you need one to cry out?”

She rolls her eyes before rolling over slightly to stare at the canopy of the bed. Alina has just managed to identify a second constellation formed by the stitching of gold thread on the canopy when the room turns even darker than before. She stiffens, even as she reassures herself that he’s simply pulled the curtains closed. 

A flame crowning a candle appears next to the bed, and she can see his profile, his bare shoulders and torso. 

“For now, you can call me Kirigan.”

Her brows arch with skepticism. “I’m sure it won’t be difficult to ask around for a diplomat’s real name.”

He disrobes no further as he sets down the candle, and his weight sinks down the space next to her. “It’s the name I sign the papers around here with, but it’s not my real name.”

He terrifies her, and yet, watching him, Alina can admit begrudgingly, “You don’t look like someone who has to pay for this.”

His eyes return to hers, a lazy smile on his lips. “Seems like I had to pay for it to be you though.”

Alina stares at him, uncertain of how to respond, and instead, slowly sits up. It’s pointless trying to cover herself with her arms now. “Do you want me to —”

“Could I tie your hands for this?”

Alina swallows, and again, that infuriating smile. 

“For my own safety of course.”

He paid. As she recalls the Madam saying, he paid enough to have anything he wants from her. 

Chin jutting out petulantly, Alina brings her wrists together and offers him their junction to twine in...the ribbon he pulls from her loosened hair. She half-wishes she had grown it longer considering how his eyes travel over her. Even with a mere brush against her knees, her breasts feel plucked and too sensitive.

At least he didn’t bind her hands behind her back, she muses as she tests the strength of his knot. Tight, but she could probably still try to claw his eyes out if the need arises.

His gaze is more expectant now, less playful, and Alina tries to even her breathing as she lies down, trying not to squirm. He crouches over her, blocking out her view of the canopy that she was planning to concentrate on. A telling ridge grazes her navel, and she curses how the heat between her legs seems to clench in anticipation for it. 

His eyes, dark fire, sear down her throat, skimming across the tremulous slopes from one nipple to another and down the abdominal line of her belly, until she feels his gaze rest on the slit between her legs. His eyes, his smile, return to her tight-lipped face as he lifts her left thigh over his right and pulls her core closer to his. His hand, not entirely the soft hand of a diplomat who touches only paper and inks during the day, soothes a slow path from her knee to her hipbone, then down again, warming his palm through her skin. 

For the most part, she manages to not grind back against his fingertips as they dip into a similarly slow pattern between her legs, coaxing wetness to rub on her pleated flesh. There’s nothing else to focus on though, and she cannot look him in the eye as he sinks two fingers into her, the small bud of her sex molding around the contours of his knuckles as if some part of her instinctively wants to anchor him there.

His fingers drag out, then slide back in, feeling and testing how tightly her contours cling to him as she gnaws her bottom lip white. 

One vacillating second, she feels too tight to take in even one finger, and the next, she feels lush and swollen enough to welcome more of him to the hilt. His slickened thumb circles her clit, flicking it, and she bucks, her bound hands bouncing against her pelvis. 

He chooses then to slant his body down, sliding down hers. Greeting the mess he’s made of her inner thighs is his exhale of warm breath, and then his nose is prodding her, his tongue laving and licking inside to open her up further. His mouth seems to only leave her overwrought cunt alone to dapple kisses on her thigh, on her belly, before devouring her again. Her mind blurs as to who has contributed more to the gloss smearing from thigh to thigh. His arms keep her thighs spread and her pelvis from bucking again, but they also smoothe up and down her sides whenever her hips cant up with a tremor. His hand follows the arching slope of her back before kneading along the nip of her waist and more roughly, the cheeks of her bottom as her limbs loosen in comfort.

Head tossing back and eyes squeezing shut, Alina feels like she can hear a foreign heartbeat in her ears, the drum of it growing more insistent and unignorable as one of his hands wraps around her bound fists. Better, she thinks foggily, better to follow the beat of the drum than listen to how obscenely wet it sounds being kissed and tongued more fervently down there than she’s ever been on the mouth. 

She has felt like this before, both like this and differently. Her palms burn with a not-yet familiar heat, the whorls of her fingertips pinpricked with something electric. She should warn the man, she really should.

He sucks a pink furl of beyond well-teased tenderness, and she cannot voice anything fast enough to stop the light surging, overflowing, from her fists, radiating so hot that she feels like it scorches down to her bones.

His head lifts, his other hand coming up to fully envelop her tightly linked fingers. She is too sapped to do more than gape as plumes of darkness escape from their joined hands, swallowing and smoking out the rays of light.

Her thighs are still trembling as she brings them inwards to curl into a sitting position, panting softly and not entirely sure if the remaining slithers of shadow are real or a figment of her blurred vision. 

Even as the coils of darkness recede from her to linger around the languid form of their natural master, Alina does not feel as frightened as she feels...curious. She does not feel like how she imagines her client last week felt around her. This man, she wants to see again.

“So this is why you asked for me.”

His hand curves around her calf, sliding up under her knee. His eyes flicker down to where she is still dripping onto his bedsheets. “I had more than one reason.”

Gingerly, she touches his wrist, his palm. Inside her, a croon that she thought had subsided for the night _sings_ out as she intertwines their fingers again. “You're a Grisha then.”

“As are you. And there are others you can meet if you leave the Menagerie. With me.”

She plays his half-smile back at him. “Is it like this with other Grisha?”

He reaches for her fully, pulling her into his lap. “No. But perhaps, I first need to show you why.”

She grinds down, core pressing against core, biting her lip as she realizes how unfinished they are. “So show me then.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> When mum asks why you're 'working' on Xmas...


End file.
